The installer should be upgraded to r1, or the 2.6.18 kernel - it provides a great deal more hardware support. r0 was very basic; r1 is more like the package-management system. The Sarge documentation says that the r0 installer only supports up to an Intel 815 chipset. It may be that including the 'libaata' driverset would solve this; is there any way to get it to included in the meantime?

The oldest LGA 775 chipset you can buy easily right now is an Intel 945. I put my Intel 945 chipset in 'legacy' mode, where the PATA drives are reported first. The default Debian installer on the .43 Kick-Start CD wouldn't mount the CD-ROM, but the expert install will. Expert install fails when it's trying to partition the hard drive. (The .42 install did the same thing.)

So then I tried adding a 3ware 9590SE RAID controller, the BIOS recognizes the drives, and will boot from them, but the installer won't even see them. The latest Sarge installer works; Gnoppix runs fine. I think the SATA drives may be reported under a different path than the default expected by the installer.

Here are some supporting SATA links & some workaround excerpt, I may try installing on an IDE drive next:

A: The Sarge version of the installer has very limited support for SATA. The versions available for Etch use more recent kernels that have very much improved SATA support. So if you don't really need Sarge your best option is to use the Etch version of the installer and install Etch.

If you do really want to install Sarge, there are four options for SATA users:

1. You can try the 2.4.27 kernel which is default in the Sarge installer. This kernel includes some support for SATA. 2. Install using the Linux 2.6 kernel which should somewhat have better support for your SATA hardware (boot the installer with "linux26"). 3. See if you can change your SATA settings in the BIOS from something like "Native mode" to "Compatibility mode" (might be labeled differently) 4. Use an unofficial version of the Sarge installer that uses a backported more recent kernel, like the one created by Kenshi Muto available from DebianInstaller/CustomImages.

2. Rebuild your installer using kernel 2.4.27 or later, which includes libata, desirable since it adds many new chipsets and gives a (potential, subject to physical read limits, etc.) ~10M/s speed boost to some others compared to the quite slow 2.4.x drivers/ide set.

3. Temporarily add a regular PATA drive to your system. Install Linux onto that. Fetch or build a kernel with support for your chipset. Migrate your system to the SATA drives.